Door 24: Peace in War

With the ongoing war in Afghanistan and our troops spending the holidays without their families and with sand dunes instead of snowbanks, it's worth remembering the famous, generous "Christmas Truce" of World War I that happened between British and German troops at many places along the Front. For an armistice that lasted for 48 hours, together they buried their dead, played football, opened mail from home, and supped.

As recorded in Barnes & Noble's ever-fascinating Daybook, which quotes the "famous British soldier-cartoonist of trench life, Bruce Bairnsfather"—he drew the picture to the left—within Silent Night by Stanley Weintraub,

Even after the extraordinary Christmas Eve, soldiers were astonished by what they saw at daylight on Christmas Day. "I awoke at dawn," Bruce Bairnsfather recalled, "and on emerging on all fours from my dugout, became aware that the trench was practically empty. I stood upright in the mud and looked over the parapet. No Man's Land was full of clusters ... of khaki and gray ... pleasantly chatting together.

This is a modern image of peace that seems to fit within the catalog of animal rivals at peace within Isaiah 11, starting at verse six:

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain. ...

Should you wish to read more about the brief Christmas armistice—and in the penciled handwriting of Captain Robert Hamilton, of the 1st battalion Royal Warwickshire regiment—click the following image, which I found via this Daily Mail article. (Image will enlarge once you click it.) His last sentence, including the detail of "some jolly good cigars," is particularly charming.